At PTR we believe in collaboration and working closely with our clients to ensure that not only do they get the business intelligence solution they want, but that it is one they can control, manage, support and grow as well. We engage in a partnership with our clients offering a collaborative and mentoring style of consultancy blended with coaching, training and education as required.
Thanks to lockdown, we all got used to working remotely.
Training providers - like us - had to find new ways to teach, and many businesses adjusted to the idea of virtual classes delivered remotely.
So all our courses are now available as remote virtual classes, both as public scheduled and closed and tailored courses. Our instructors had lots of fun playing with new gadgets and getting used to seeing themselves on screen.
I spend the majortiy of my time on consultancy projects these days, but I was delighted to bring my consultancy experience back to the virtual classroom to deliver a remote, two-day training session on Designing a Data Warehouse. Armed with Zoom, a PowerPoint Presentation, an e-book, a webcam, a headset and a document reader (plus the use of Zoom breakout rooms to facilitate group-based lab work) I spent two days enlightening 11 delegates on the Kimball Dimensional Modelling techniques. It's initially a strange experience knowing that attendees can see me and my every move (while I can’t see them when their videos are turned off).
To keep people engaged online, a new way of teaching is needed. So we introduce regular breaks, regular question-and-answer sessions, and a shorter day - because staring at a screen all day is tiring and tough on the eyes. Breakout rooms are great for group labs, enabling time for less formal conversation, interaction, sharing of ideas and a different visual focus. I’m still on hand to help and answer questions throughout, as at any time participants can invite me into their breakout rooms to assist. After some chat time I bring them back to the main class to review solutions and move onwards to more topics.
Without the luxury of a formal training room setting, remote instructors have to adapt to digital whiteboarding - using touchscreen tablets with drawing apps and a stylus. I find a Document Reader enables me to draw with multicoloured pens, just as I might in a classroom setting on paper, to explain something in answer to a question, or to complement a presentation.
This was my view for the two days:
It is a totally different training world, but nevertheless still an enjoyable one - as long as it's structured in a way that's highly interactive, with regular breaks, and a variety of visual aids and teaching methods. It's crucial to keep it all as stimulating and fun as possible. I’m thinking of creating some Kahoot quizzes next time I present a course, as a fun way to carry out knowledge checks (if you haven't heard of Kahoot, ask a school pupil - I'll bet they’ve used it!).
You may think that an Excel Workbook already provides a table of data to you, and in a sense it does, an area consisting of Rows and Columns, with column and row headings and values.
It is, however, possible to create formal Tables from ranges of cells on an Excel worksheet.
Why would we want to do this?
Well, here are a few reasons:
We know that this is a very difficult time for businesses and individuals across the UK. Given the fast changing situation with Coronavirus (COVID-19) we wanted to let you know what we are doing to ensure we maintain business continuity and remain able to deliver our services to you over the coming months.
Having spent over 25 years working with customers on their data warehouses, there are few mistakes that I haven’t seen made during their construction. The reality in fact, is that many organisations underestimate the complexities of building a data warehouse – or at least, building the RIGHT data warehouse for their business needs.
Here are six crucial aspects to building a data warehouse that will help you avoid the many pitfalls along the way of its construction.
In many instances you could choose either, but 8 key questions to ask before making your decision are:
Are you planning on deploying to Azure Analysis Services or On-Premise Analysis Services?
Do you wish to be able to extend your analytics model with custom dimension fields/expressions?
Do you wish to embed hyperlinks into your analytics model?
Do you wish to carry out ETL operations within your analytics model or using a service such as SSIS prior to building your analytics model?
Do you wish to have automatic support for Ragged Depth Hierarchies and Custom Rollups?
Do you require writeback capability to your analytics model?
Do you have any Multidimensional or Tabular design experience with your business?
Are you planning on using Power BI to deliver enterprise wide reports and dashboards?
This article was inspired after one of our training delegates (Declan!) asked the question “How would you calculate how many egg cartons you need for a given number of eggs?”.
This is a common challenge that we come across. We have an order quantity of a product, we know how many products we can fit in a box, pack or carton, but we want to calculate how many packs we need to be able to ship or deliver the ordered products.
Do you remember the days when business data was just a series of digits presented in a variety of formats, none of which seemed to give you an overall understanding of what you were actually looking at?
The emergence of platforms that compile key business stats into easily understood dashboards and reports, mean that various forms of data visualisation are now being adopted by most companies. In fact, you could go as far to say that it is now a pre-requisite for efficient business management.
